


no other faith is light enough for this place

by Anonymous



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Fix-It, Grief/Mourning, M/M, Minor Eileen Leahy/Sam Winchester, Post-Episode: s15e18 Despair, Prayer, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-31
Updated: 2020-12-31
Packaged: 2021-03-11 03:14:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,463
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28448256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: "It’s not habit that has Dean kneeling on the ground beside his bed, hands clasped, head bent. He’s not the praying kind, never has been, and he sure as hell doesn’t intend to be now, knowing what he knows. But he has prayed, often, and he knows he’s been heard. He’s been answered, even.He won’t be heard now. He knows that. He gets on his knees anyway.“Cas, I know you can’t hear me—”And that’s as far as he gets."Dean prays to Cas, and comes to some belated realizations.
Relationships: Castiel/Dean Winchester
Comments: 29
Kudos: 210
Collections: Anonymous





	no other faith is light enough for this place

**Author's Note:**

> This one's for you, [georgia destiel putin](https://twitter.com/fairypsychic/status/1324683033081991168?lang=en). Pretty sure the night of November 5, 2020 singlehandedly kept me from having an election-related nervous breakdown, only to replace it with a wholly different but at least much more fun nervous breakdown! This fic is the result.

It’s not habit that has Dean kneeling on the ground beside his bed, hands clasped, head bent. He’s not the praying kind, never has been, and he sure as hell doesn’t intend to be now, knowing what he knows. But he has prayed, often, and he knows he’s been heard. He’s been answered, even.

He won’t be heard now. He knows that. He gets on his knees anyway.

“Cas, I know you can’t hear me—”

And that’s as far as he gets. The sound that comes out of him is not a prayer or even any words at all, it’s just awful, wracking sobs, the kind of crying that comes over you like sudden sickness, like the purging of poison, and he’s helpless to stop it. It’s as if his lungs and his heart are being wrung out like so much bloody laundry, squeezed and twisted, and it hurts, it hurts so fucking bad, and all he can do is clutch at his bedspread and let the awful sounds and tears come out of him.

It lasts for a while. He doesn’t know how long. Eventually he crawls into bed, exhausted and wrung dry of everything—sorrow and grief and guilt and pain—nothing but a painfully dry husk left.

* * *

The next night, he’s on his knees again. He goes through the motions: clasping his hands, bowing his head, closing his eyes. It’s not as if it matters, how he does this. Only one person has ever answered him; otherwise, this has always been an empty ritual, nothing more than pleas and shouts into an uncaring void. Empty or not though, it’s still a ritual, and there’s comfort in letting himself fall into its well-worn grooves. Though even if this did work, it wouldn’t matter if he assumed the appropriate penitent posture.

When his prayers had been heard, when they’d been answered in purgatory, or outside a shitty motel room, it had never mattered how or where he made them. 

Still he gets on his knees and stays there, even when he can’t manage anything other than the single word that makes this a prayer at all. “Cas—”

And he can’t. He can’t he can’t he can’t. 

He presses his face against the covers until the quilt grows damp, and then he crawls into bed, empty.

* * *

Another night, another pointless attempt at prayer.

His knees begin to ache sharply after only a few minutes. He should put a pillow down or something, but the pain is almost welcome. It grounds him in his body, all its bitter realities: the way his knees snap and click every time he kneels, the way his back aches, the tight stretch of his tense shoulders, the heaviness centered in his chest, the weight whose name is this prayer he can’t get out.

He’s getting old. Yeah, he’s over the hill of 40, that’s not _old_ old, but it’s hunter old, and it’s older than he’d ever expected to be. Time has left and keeps leaving its mark on him, and those marks are lasting longer than the ones Cas had left. 

In this moment, Dean hates that. He hates that the handprint scar is gone, the old burn having long since faded and healed. He wants every last bit of Cas that’s left in the world, and there’s so little of it, too little, not even Dean’s own damn body hanging onto him, like he should’ve held on when the Empty—

Anyway. Dean wants the scar back. He has to settle instead for the sigils still on his ribs, invisible to him, and the knowledge that once, Cas had remade all of this: Dean’s hands and heart and eyes and lungs, every inch of his skin, every bone. Dean’s heard the bit of trivia that every seven years, you’re a whole new person, sort of, all your cells having died and become new cells or something, and he hopes, he really really hopes, that it’s not true. Because if it’s true, even Dean’s body has been almost wiped clean of Cas. Once Cas had been here, his grace pouring through every last nook and cranny of Dean’s broken down body, and now there’s nothing left of him but the carvings on his ribs. Nothing left but Dean. Dean, whom Cas had left. 

He manages to get a whole sentence out this time. It’s a useless prayer, more useless than any of them, but it’s all he has.

“Cas, I wish—I wish you’d stop leaving. Come back. Please. Come home. If there’s any way you can, if—please.”

It’s not like he thinks it will work. Why the fuck would it? But he has to try. 

He stays on his knees, the ache getting worse and worse, his legs burning with pins and needles, his lower back spasming with dire warnings about how much he’s gonna regret this come tomorrow, but he’s thinking of penitent monks kneeling on hard wooden pews in freezing stone churches, of ecstatic holy men fasting in the baking desert heat, of pilgrims whipping their own backs as they walk plague-ridden roads. He thinks of some homeless guy he’d seen once, shirtless and barefoot, carrying a cross down the street, an actual cross: wooden and heavy, as tall as he’d been, the end dragging and scraping along the ground, heedless of the raw red marks and rising bruises on his shoulder and side from where he was carrying it. He wonders, idly, how long the man had carried the cross, if he was carrying it still. He wonders if he got used to the weight of it, the splinters, the pain. He thinks of all that, and the long-gone burn scar on his shoulder. He thinks of how much faith hurts. And through it all, he thinks _please_ , and stays kneeling.

* * *

They’ve saved the world, but not Cas. If Dean were a better person, he’d understand that tradeoff, he’d be okay with it. But he’s not, and he isn’t.

Jack had told them the Empty is beyond even his new godly powers. _There’s a balance...I don’t think I can risk upsetting it, not now._

 _But later?_ Dean had asked him, because if all he has to do is wait, then sure, yeah, he can handle that. He can try. He’d waited 40 years, once, not knowing it was Cas he was waiting for. He can wait a little longer, if—

 _Maybe, a few thousand years from now, the Empty will be willing to bargain,_ Jack had said, wincing.

And maybe Dean will be up in some lonely Heaven by then, maybe the time won’t matter, once he’s dead in a year or five or ten, maybe he should accept that slim thread of hope, the smallest chance of reunion, but he can’t. He can’t.

So he hits the books. He’s not sure if it’s habit or hope that has him scouring the library for anything that could help him get Cas back: any spell, any ritual, any magical object. He looks for days that turn into weeks, and the only reason Sam doesn’t stage an intervention is that Dean is still doing other things too: keeping an eye out for any hunts that come up, cooking, eating. He takes care of Miracle, and he tells Sam he’s fine, and he is, he’s fine.

Sam helps him research, sometimes, though after a few weeks, he returns Dean’s latest stack of books back to their shelves and returns with a few more before he sits down.

“What are you looking for, Dean?” he asks, gentle, too fucking gentle.

“You know what I’m looking for,” says Dean, not taking his eyes from the book in front of him.

“A way to get Cas back, right, I know. I want him back too. But—what do you think could bring him back? He’s not—he’s not dead, not like—not like a human would be. He’s in the Empty, and I’m not sure there’s any lore to be found, about bringing someone back from that.”

“Jack already brought him back once,” retorts Dean. “If there’s anything, I’m gonna find it.”

But there’s nothing. He’s down to myths that might be actual myths, and that don’t apply anyway: Orpheus going down to the Underworld to get Eurydice back, the descent of Inanna, dozens of other stories of folks bargaining with demons and fairies and anything that would listen for passage to the afterlife, to bring their wives or husbands back. Unsurprisingly, there’s no precedent for _human wants to get an angel trapped in the void beyond all existence back_. 

He has a few half-baked ideas anyway, like getting Jack to take him to the Empty so he can pull Cas out. When he suggests it to Jack, Jack’s face crumples, and he suddenly looks very, very young.

“And how would you get back out? How would you even find him? Dean, I don’t wanna lose you too.”

And fuck, he’s the most powerful being in the universe right now, he’s barely ever even here, though he says he’s everywhere, too busy fixing what Chuck had fucked up, but he also looks like a scared kid, he’s _Cas’s_ scared kid, and all of a sudden Dean remembers being alone in motel rooms with Sam, terrified that Dad wasn’t going to come back. Once, when Dean had been pretty little but still old enough to know better, he’d begged his dad to stay. And John had just said _I’m doing this for your mother, Dean_ , and Dean had said _Mom is dead, what’s the point?_ John hadn’t answered. He’d just left.

Dean can’t do that to Jack.

“Okay,” says Dean, and hugs the kid. “I’m sorry, I won’t go, okay? I’m sorry.”

Jack clings tightly. “I miss him, and I know you miss him too. But please, Dean. He—he’d want you to live your life. He’d want you to be happy.”

_And how the fuck am I supposed to do that, without him here?_

He wonders if it’s Jack who hears his prayers now, if this is the only answer he’ll ever get: _live your life, try to be happy_. 

“I know,” he says. “I’ll try.”

* * *

He drinks his way through a bottle of whiskey that night. It doesn’t make anything better, doesn’t even take the edge off of—off of anything. All it does is make him feel physically miserable, on top of everything else, and it’s not the clean pain of staying on his knees too long, or the almost satisfying ache in his back and thighs, it’s just disgusting misery: a sour stomach, a pounding head, swimming vision. The booze sloshes around all his empty spaces, and it makes him feel like he’s a boat at sea, capsizing, water rushing in through all the holes while he sinks and sinks and drowns.

He doesn’t know why he’d even fucking bothered.

He must look really pathetic, because Sam helps him into bed without any pissy or judgey comments, just makes him drink a lot of water. 

“Dean,” says Sam, and puts a hand on his shoulder. He doesn’t say anything else. The world just keeps spinning when Dean closes his eyes, so he opens them, looks at Sam. All he sees on Sam’s face are heartbreak and fear, and it’s the fear that has Dean patting Sam’s hand.

“It’s okay,” he mutters. “I’m okay.”

“No, you’re not. And I don’t know how to—what to—”

Shit, and here Dean thought he’d been making a good show of it. 

“There’s nothing,” he says, and closes his eyes. “Just gotta—get through it. I’m fine.”

Eventually Sam leaves, and once the room stops spinning, Dean prays. Not on his knees this time, because moving seems like a bad call judging by the uncomfortable sloshing of his stomach, but he looks up into the dark of his room, and thinks of the dark of the Empty.

“Cas, I’m not gonna give up. On you, or on—on me.”

Because Cas had said—and fuck, Dean can’t think about it, but it’s all he thinks about, it’s like a song stuck in his head that will never, ever come out—and he can’t—Cas had said _you’re the most caring man on earth, you’re the most selfless, loving human being I will ever know—_ and it’s bullshit, obviously it’s bullshit, but Cas had believed it, he’d—and Dean doesn’t know what to do with that. With Cas’ ridiculous, clearly misplaced faith. 

What Dean does know is that Cas would want him to be happy, no matter what. But still—

“I wasn’t worth this,” he whispers. Not that it matters. Cas had done it anyway. From the moment he’d pulled Dean out of hell, he’d kept thinking Dean was worth this. “I wasn’t _worth_ this, but I guess I’m gonna try anyway.”

* * *

Hunts have been thin on the ground lately, and Dean knows Sam’s been tossing a lot of them other hunters’ way. The only reason Dean hasn’t argued with Sam about it is that fewer hunts means more time for Dean to research a way to get Cas back.

And he can admit to himself: he’s tired. 

He’s so fucking _tired_. He’s lost count of the apocalypses by now, and every time he tries to convince himself that this is just like any other job—that he’s gotta clock in and out just the same as every other poor bastard, even if there is no clock, just more shallow graves and pyres—he can’t quite muster up the resolve to get back on the job. _I quit_ , he imagines himself saying. _I’ve put in my twenty and then some, time to cash in on my non-existent pension_. 

He prays to Cas about it. He sits on the floor by his bed—on his ass this time, his knees really can’t take the floor right now—and bows his head.

“Hey Cas,” he says, and the words come easier now. “I’ve been thinking of quitting lately. Quitting hunting, I mean. Not quitting entirely I guess, I’ll still help out if Sam needs me or whatever. And I’m still looking for a way to bust you out, obviously. But…I’m tired, man. All those years saving people, hunting things...I thought, you know, someone’s gotta do it. People need to be protected. But now I’m thinking, maybe I’m not the one who needs to be out there doing it all the time, you know? I’ve put in my time, I’ve helped save the world.”

Dean’s been a hunter nearly his whole life. He’ll always be a hunter. But— _selfless. Loving. Caring._ Cas thought he was all that.

“I don’t know what else to do though, Cas,” he admits. “I’m—I’m scared of trying something else.”

What would Cas tell him, if he was here? Probably that he could do anything, that he could live in the world they’d helped save. That he could write his own story now. Be part of Team Free Will 3.0.

“You’d tell me it’s time to write my own story, I think,” he murmurs. “And y’know, I’m not sure I’d mind if I wrote a boring one. For a while, anyway. Worth a shot, right?”

So Dean looks into getting a job: a real, normal person job that isn’t hunting. He’s not exactly qualified for much, but he checks with all the mechanics and body shops within an hour’s drive of the bunker, confident that Baby’s as good as a resume and that he can lie about the rest.

He manages to hit it off with the owner of a shop that’s far enough from Lebanon that the guy who runs it doesn’t bat an eye at the name Dean Campbell. Mitch of Mitch’s Motors and Mechanics is duly impressed by Baby and Dean’s knowledge of her, and doesn’t seem too fussed about things like resumes and references. He accepts Dean’s story of having worked at Singer Salvage before Bobby died easily enough, but he says he can’t offer Dean more than a part-time contractor position.

“That’s all right,” Dean tells him. “I’d just like to work, sir.”

“We’re both too old for that sir shit,” says Mitch with a snort, before leveling a too-knowing stare at Dean. “And I hear you. Sometimes work’s the best cure for grief.”

“Excuse me?” It’s been years since Bobby—

Mitch smiles, sad and grim, and not unkind. “You got the look of a widower about you, son. I looked like that, ‘round your age, when I lost my first wife Laura.”

A widower. Mitch thinks he’s a _widower_. “I—” he starts, ready to issue an automatic denial, but the words choke him, and he doesn’t know what the hell is happening on his face, because Mitch’s expression takes on a horrible, pitying softness.

“Ah hell, it hasn’t been long, has it. I’m sorry, Dean.”

“I’m not—we weren’t married,” he manages to say, like that’s the important thing here.

“That don’t make much difference, I expect.”

Dean wonders what it is that’s giving him away, only there’s nothing to give away, he’s not—he’s not _widowed_. He’s not sure what the hell word there is for what he is, other than a fucking wreck, but widower sure as hell isn’t it, because he and Cas—he and Cas were— _are_ —but Cas had told him that—

No. Dean can’t think about that. He can’t.

Bereaved, he remembers. That’s the word. He’s always thought it sounded almost violent.

“Sorry,” mutters Dean, trying to get a goddamn hold of himself, to ease the ragged pace of his breath, breaths that want to become sobs. “Shit, sorry, I—”

“It’s alright,” says Mitch, gentle, so fucking gentle. And then he’s kind enough to get back to business. “Now, there are a coupla forms you gotta fill out, then you can start on Monday...”

* * *

He drives for ten minutes before he has to pull over because he can’t see through the tears in his eyes, because he’s thinking about what Cas had told him, before the Empty took him, and he tries not to think about that, he can’t think about that, because—

 _I love you_ , Cas had said, and Dean doesn’t know what the fuck that meant, given that it ended up being the reason Cas had been taken from him. _I love you,_ Cas had said, and all Dean could hear was _goodbye_. 

* * *

When he gets back to the bunker, Sam and Eileen want to celebrate Dean’s new, all-normal job, and Dean lets them, just to ease some of the sharp worry that’s always in Sam’s eyes now, when he looks at Dean. He eats the celebratory dinner with them, has a few beers. And it’s good, it is, it’s good to see Sam almost content, it’s good to see him and Eileen and the delicate thing growing between them like a blooming spring flower.

But the word _widower_ is still echoing in Dean’s head, right along with the things Cas had told him, like the world’s worst and most emotionally compromising earworm, so he tells Sam and Eileen he’s turning in early.

After he brushes his teeth in the bathroom, he actually takes stock of himself in the mirror, and searches for just what the hell it is that Mitch saw. Dean doesn’t see anything noteworthy: freckles, an increasing number of wrinkles, end-of-the-day stubble, slightly puffy and red-rimmed eyes. He looks tired, sure. He usually does, and he usually is, especially this side of 40. 

He looks his reflection in the eye. It’s not his favorite activity ever. He looks...lost, maybe. Sad. Which is understandable, right? He’s had a rough few months. A rough few years. And Cas is—his best friend is gone, hopefully not permanently, fuck, Dean’s doing his best to make sure it’s not permanent, but still. He’s gone right now, and Dean’s alone, and he’s trying to scrape together a life out of all the broken pieces he has left—

Yeah, okay. Maybe that’s the look Mitch was talking about. Bereft.

* * *

Because being middle-aged is a nightmare, Dean’s shins vigorously protest any attempt at kneeling so he figures fuck it, it’s not like it really matters how he does this and no way does he want to end up hobbling around the next morning with Sam asking him what’s wrong, so he gets in bed. 

“Hey Cas,” he starts, and for a moment, in the dark of his bedroom and the warmth of his bed, he can almost imagine that Cas is here, that he’ll answer with his habitual, _hello Dean_. He always says it with such _gravity_. Like it’s important, more than just a greeting, all his focus on Dean.

Cas isn’t here, of course. In all likelihood, he can’t even hear Dean. But if there’s even the smallest chance he can, Dean’s gonna keep praying.

“So, I got a job. Like, a normal, non-hunting job. Mechanic. Just part-time, and as a contractor, so it’s not much. But. It’s a job that’s not hunting, and—that feels good, I guess. Feels like writing my own story or whatever. Uh, I’m still working on finding a way to get you out. Been reading a lot of lore, most of it’s about busting people out of the Underworld or the afterlife or whatever, but...hoping I’ll find something that’ll apply.” 

Shit, this is a mistake. It’s a mistake to do this while he’s lying in bed in the dark, when he can delude himself into thinking there could be someone else on the other side of the bed with him. Which is dumb, because this bed isn’t really big enough for that, and anyway, it’s not like he and Cas had shared a bed often or anything. Just a few times, out of necessity. Though who knows how many times Cas had sat in his room and watched him sleep, like a creeper. 

Fuck, Dean misses him. Dean turns on his side, and looks at the empty other half of his bed, barely visible in the dark. Maybe he should start letting Miracle sleep in here with him.

“Mitch, the guy who hired me, he—” Shit, what the fuck is Dean thinking, he can’t tell Cas that, can’t say the word _widower_ out loud. He changes course. “He seems nice. And I didn’t tell him anything, but he said work’s the best cure for grief sometimes. So I guess it’s obvious, that I’m—you know. But Cas, I’m sick of grieving you, man. I don’t want to do it again. So please, if there’s any way, if you’re awake in there—come back. And stay, this time. I want you to stay.”

* * *

Life ticks on, slow and quiet. Dean works at Mitch’s garage, and keeps an eye out for hunts, passing most of them on to other hunters, though Sam and Eileen take any that are within a day’s drive of the bunker. 

“You sure you’ll be okay here on your own?” Sam asks, every time, his entire face scrunched up in frankly excessive worry.

“Why wouldn’t I be? And who says I’m on my own? Miracle here will keep me company,” says Dean, and claps Sam on the shoulder. “I’m good, Sammy, call me if you two need any research or backup.”

Being alone in the bunker isn’t Dean’s favorite thing ever, but he can handle it for a few days. He tries not to think about what he’ll do when Sam and Eileen inevitably move out and it’s just him and Miracle rattling around in here, digging through books and artifacts, still looking for a way to get Cas out of the Empty, still praying, with only silence to hear him. It won’t come to that, he hopes. 

Dean spends weeks going down the research rabbit holes of the lore about people retrieving their loved ones from the Underworld or afterlife or whatever, with nothing to show for it. The Empty doesn’t have any convenient portals or entrances, and Dean has nothing to bargain with but himself, and the Empty doesn’t give a shit about him, not when it has all those angels and demons. And anyway, he’d told Jack he wouldn’t go haring off to the Empty himself. 

So he changes tack, starts looking into anything to do with the Empty and everything it or things like it have been called over the course of history: Erebus, Chaos, Nun, the primordial darkness...mostly he finds a lot of creation myths, and none of those are applicable, obviously. Though the one about Atum jacking off into the primordial waters and making life that way gives him a bit of a chuckle.

“Don’t suppose that’ll work for you, Cas,” he murmurs. “Not like we want to make a whole new universe or any more gods anyway.”

Which is a shame, because if that’s what Dean wanted to do, there are plenty of examples of it.

“Jack’s doing good though. Says he’s working on some reforms in Heaven,” says Dean absently, moving on to the next book. The Greeks this time.

_At the beginning there was only Chaos, Night, Darkness, and the Abyss. Earth, the Air and Heaven had no existence. Firstly, blackwinged Night laid a germless egg in the bosom of the infinite deeps of Darkness, and from this, after the revolution of long ages, sprang the graceful Love with his glittering golden wings, swift as the whirlwinds of the tempest. He mated in the deep Abyss with dark Chaos, winged like himself, and thus hatched forth our race, which was the first to see the light…_

Dean frowns down at the page. Night, Darkness, _and_ the Abyss? Aren’t those all basically the same thing? Whatever. There is something here though, maybe. Can the Empty be...changed? He hasn’t got any handy magical egg-laying bird deities or whatever available. And even if he did, it probably wouldn’t be a good idea. What if any attempt to change the Empty just woke up all the angels and demons stuck there? It would turn into some kind of fucked up battle royale, way worse than any primordial chaos, and that wouldn’t be any help to Cas.

He sighs, and keeps looking.

* * *

Sometimes Dean makes no progress in his research, but he doesn’t want to leave Cas hanging, so he talks about his day instead. Some nights, describing a minivan in desperate need of an oil change is the best part of his day, and isn’t that a sad commentary on the sorry state of his retirement, but it’s all he has.

“Hey Cas, nothing too interesting to report today, I guess. Oh, I uh, I watched one of the new Star Wars shows. They just keep making new movies and shit, and none of ‘em are as good as the originals, but I—it was fine, I guess. Kind of a Western in some ways, which is cool. I missed you though. I mean, I missed our movie nights. Kept expecting you to ask me questions and nitpick everything. All those times I told you to just shut up and enjoy the movie, and now I—anyway. I’m still looking through the bunker’s library, and I got a couple leads on some other grimoires that could help. So, uh, hang in there.”

* * *

“You know how the bunker has that old record player? I’ve been getting some new records for it—well, newer than the stuff from the 50s, anyway. Sam keeps making fun of me for being so behind the times, what with the cassette tapes and the records and all, but sometimes the classics are just better, okay? Like, it’s not a mixtape unless it’s a _tape_ , needing to turn it over is, y’know, part of the whole thing.” He shifts, turns over on his side. “Hey, remember that mixtape I made you? With all these new records, I keep hearing a song and thinking ‘I gotta put that on a mixtape for Cas.’ So that’s something for you to look forward to, I guess. I mean. I hope. That, uh, you’ll like it. And that you liked the other mixtape too. Um, yeah. Right. Talk to you later.” 

* * *

“I was walking Miracle today and she got into it with a couple of bees. Just, like, doing her best to fight the damn things, even though they’re just a couple of tiny bees. It reminded me of that time you, you know, with the bees.” Dean grins and chuckles just thinking about it, even if he can’t quite bring himself to say _naked and covered and bees_ while he’s _praying_. “It cracked me up, Miracle barking her head off at the bees, remembering you, and I could not stop laughing, man.” His smile fades a little. “Don’t even remember the last time I laughed like that.” 

_Way to be a downer, Winchester_ , he thinks, and rubs at his face. Shit. “I’m okay though. Sam and Eileen are doing good too. And you’d be so proud of Jack, he’s—he’s doing his best to be good, to do good, you know? He’s being hands off and all, mostly, but he says heaven’s coming along well. We miss you though. I’m still trying to find a way to bust you out, okay? I promise.”

* * *

The fucked up thing is, as horribly one-sided as his probably pointless little ritual of nightly prayer is, it’s the most Dean’s talked to Cas in a while. Now all the shit that had kept them so at odds feels less like the burning wound it had been at the time and more like an itchy healing scar. There are no more apocalypses to worry about, no terrible choices looming. It gives him too much fucking time to think about all the shit he and Cas have been through, all the ways Dean has failed him. It puts him back on his metaphorical knees again, night after night, a litany of penitence. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, as if it will make a difference.

“Cas, I’m sorry I ever made you leave,” he says. “This is your home, okay? I hope you know that now.”

The next night: “I know you’d tell me it was the Mark of Cain talking, that I don’t have to apologize, but I gotta, Cas. I—I’m sorry I hurt you, I’m so sorry.” Shit. He needs to get it together. He sniffs, wipes his eyes. “Not sorry for shooting and stabbing you back in that barn after you pulled me out of hell though. You scared the shit out of me, and I had no idea who you were.”

Cas had been so different, back then. Still awkward in his vessel, palpably inhuman. The intensity of his stare had never changed though. He’s been looking right into Dean for years now, and Dean’s never been sure of what Cas could possibly see that would make him stay, that would make him say—the things he said. 

Another night, after a few too many beers: “I’m sorry I couldn’t save you. Fuck, have I ever—have I _ever_ saved you when it really mattered? From Lucifer, from the Empty? I don’t know how you can even stand to look at me sometimes. Feels like all I do is fail you. I’m fucking failing you now, leaving you in the Empty, and I can’t—fuck, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry—” 

The night after that, after he stays up too late following a lead on the Empty, digging deep into the bowels of the library: “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you about Jack, Cas. He’s—he’s a good kid. He’s doing okay at this god thing. And there’s so much of you in him. I see it all the time. I just wish—I wish we could’ve given him a normal childhood, y’know? Yeah yeah, what do I know about that. But I figure, between you and me and Sam, we’d have done all right.”

He sighs, folds his arms on the bed and rests his head there. It hurts, imagining that might-have-been. It hurts, wanting it now, still.

“You’re family, you know that, right? We’re—we’re family. I know I told you before, just—” He stops, takes a few shaky breaths that are way too watery. “I want my family back,” he admits. Fuck. It feels like he’s been wanting that for his entire fucking life. 

* * *

“So, me and Eileen were gonna go out tonight,” Sam announces over breakfast.

“Yeah?” Dean says, not paying too much attention. His focus is on the eggs he’s scrambling, moving them around slow and steady on the pan.

“And that hunter who helped me and Eileen with that vampire nest, Lara, she’s in town.”

“She need something from the library?”

“Oh, uh, no. Just, I was thinking, you and Lara could come to dinner with me and Eileen.”

There, the eggs are perfect, downright creamy. He turns off the heat, and then his brain catches up to what Sam had just said. 

“Wait, are you trying to set me up on a double date?”

“Lara’s great, Dean, I’m sure you’ll like her, you have, you know, some shared life experiences—”

“What the hell!”

Sam sighs. “C’mon, Dean. It’s just a night out. It’s been months, and you’re on your own so often, I just—I worry about you, man.”

Dean crosses his arms. “Oh, this is that thing. That thing where you’re one-half of a happy couple so you think everyone else has to be too. Nope, no, not happening.” 

He turns back to the eggs, grinding the pepper mill over them with probably more force than necessary. He can damn near feel Sammy’s stupid bitchface beaming into his back. Shit, that’s way too much pepper.

“I just want you to be happy, Dean. You deserve to find someone who—”

“There’s never gonna _be_ anyone else for me,” says Dean, automatic, and then he stares down into the pan of scrambled eggs.

Fuck, he thinks, and it’s like the moment the knife sinks in, when you know it’s bad but the pain hasn’t reached your brain quite yet.

“Anyone _else_?” asks Sam, softly. “Who—”

Cas’s words—not his last, please, please, not his last—are never far from Dean’s thoughts, they’re always on a loop somewhere in the back of his head like a faint and quiet song whose lyrics he’s never going to forget, and now that song roars to full-orchestra volume, and Dean thinks the knife has been in his heart for a long, long time now, that this is the kind of wound that turns fatal the moment the weapon comes out, that it’s going to bleed him dry. But it needs to come out, he thinks vaguely, clutching at the kitchen countertop. He needs to let it come out.

His thoughts linger over the words he’d so unthinkingly said. _There’s never gonna be anyone else for me._ The truth of it clicks into place. How many nights has he spent praying to Cas, dodging that truth? How many times has he wanted to beg Cas to stay? All these years, he’s called Cas his best friend, his family, and then Cas told him _I love you_ , and the possibility of something else opened up, only to be taken away. _There’s never gonna be anyone else for me. You’re it, Cas. And I’d be mad at you for not knowing it, but I didn’t know it either, until now._

“I never told you what happened, when the Empty took Cas,” he says, and his own voice sounds very far away, because he’s still hearing Cas, again and again, over and over. _Everything you have ever done, you have done for love_. How could Cas think that about him, and still not _know,_ how did Dean not _realize_ —

“Dean?”

“I told you he made a deal,” continues Dean. Jack had known. Jack had taken one look at Dean, and he’d known, and all Dean had needed to tell him was _the Empty, it took him,_ and with impossible kindness, Jack had let Dean leave it at that. “Did Jack tell you what the deal was?”

“I—no. What—what was the deal?”

“That the Empty could take him, when he had a moment of happiness. And you know what his moment was? It was telling me he loves me.” Dean’s starting to think the metaphorical knife isn’t so metaphorical at all, because it’s getting hard to breathe. He grips the counter, hard enough to turn his knuckles white. “Not even hearing me say it back, just _telling_ me. And I couldn’t—”

“Dean, hey, you gotta breathe, it’s okay—”

His knees buckle, every breath _hurts,_ and his heart is going crazy, he’d think he’s dying if he didn’t know better, and all of a sudden Sam’s there, catching him. “It’s not, it’s _not_ okay, because I didn’t tell him, I couldn’t—and now he’s _gone_ , and I can’t get him back, I can’t—”

Sam’s trying to guide him over to the kitchen table, is probably going to make Dean breathe into a paper bag or give him a bracing slap until he gets his shit together, but it’s too late, Dean’s pulling this fucking knife free and if he bleeds out, metaphorically or otherwise, that’s just the way it’s gotta be.

“He knew, Dean, of course he knew,” tries Sam. “C’mon, you gotta slow down, breathe—”

Dean wrenches away from Sam’s hold, staggers over to the kitchen table and sinks down into one of the chairs. “No he didn’t! He didn’t know! _I_ didn’t know! I love him, I’m—I’m in love with him, and I watched him _die_ saving my worthless ass, and I can’t—I don’t know what to _do_.”

Sam joins him at the kitchen table, puts his arms around Dean, and Dean just holds on, tries to breathe. “I’m sorry, Dean. I’m so, so sorry.”

“I don’t know how to live with this,” he says, hating how frantic he sounds but unable to stop it, because he doesn’t, he doesn’t know, how can he do this when he knows just how much he’s failed Cas: failed to save him, failed to love him.

“You can, Dean, you gotta. Because there’s nothing wrong with you loving Cas, okay? Not a damn thing.”

Oh great, Sam thinks he’s having a breakdown over being kinda gay. _That is the least of my fucking problems right now,_ he wants to say, but suddenly, it all strikes Dean as hilarious. Here he is, finally dealing with what he really feels for Cas when Cas is _gone_ , when Dean might not ever, ever get Cas back, and Sam thinks it’s the _gay_ part that’s the problem here. Dean starts laughing, finds that he can’t stop, not even when Sam’s eyes go wide and worried and scared, and only then does the laughter turn into sobs, painful and deep, and here it is, the knife pulled out, the wound bleeding freely.

It feels like it should kill him, but it doesn’t.

* * *

Sam treats him like has the flu or something. He bundles Dean up in the dead guy robe and a blanket, chivvies him to his bedroom and brings him steaming hot tea with a glug of whiskey in it, sets up his laptop with some movie Dean is not gonna watch, Miracle trotting in after him. She hops on the bed like that’s allowed, and Dean doesn’t have the heart to order her off, not when she comes right up to him to nose and lick at his face. It’s kind of gross, but she’s very warm, and very cute, so he gives her a grateful scritch behind the ears.

“I should go back to the library, there’s a book I was gonna—”

“Hey, no, just—just rest for a while, okay?”

Dean purposely ignores all the anxious wrinkled forehead action happening on Sam’s face and gets up from his bed. “I need to get him back, Sam. I need to keep trying.”

“Okay. I’ll get you the book, okay? Just—stay here, get some rest.”

“I’m not fragile,” Dean snaps, even though recent evidence suggests he is in fact in the middle of an ongoing nervous breakdown, which probably counts as being kinda fragile. Sam’s bitchface communicates all of this, so Dean gives him a shove. 

“Yeah okay,” says Sam. “I’ll go get you your books.”

When Sam returns with the books, he stays for a while, helping him with the research, until Dean kicks him out to go on his date night with Eileen.

“Dude, no way, I’m not leaving you alone tonight!”

“I’m not actually sick, you know.”

He’s in sweats and his dead guy robe and he feels kinda weird, sure, but he’s not sick. He’s just kinda...floaty. Giddy, almost, only not with punchdrunk happiness or relief, but with pain, with grief. There’s a cruel kind of ecstasy in finally knowing and accepting how he feels. It figures that Dean’s the kind of asshole who can only get there by losing Cas.

“You shouldn’t be alone,” insists Sam.

“Why? I’m not gonna kill myself,” he says, because he doesn’t see why he should beat around the bush about it when that’s the fear weighing heavy in all of Sam’s silences and worried looks. Sam flinches. “What? I’m not. It wouldn’t help anything.”

Killing himself wouldn’t get him any closer to Cas, so he’s not gonna do it.

“That’s not—Dean—”

He stares at the heavy book on his lap, the words swimming in his vision. “I’m not gonna summon the Empty either, if I even could. I promised Jack. So there’s nothing to worry about.”

Sam takes a deep breath, and lets it out slowly. “That’s not how this works, but okay.”

“Go on your date, Sammy. I’ll be fine.”

* * *

After a lot more hovering, Sam does eventually leave for his date night with Eileen, and then it’s just Dean and Miracle and Dean’s epiphany/breakdown about Cas. He doesn’t know what to do. He stares at a bunch of books that have no answers for him. He considers drinking to take the edge off, but there’s no amount of alcohol that could take the edge off of this, and if he starts, he’s not sure he’ll be able to stop. Dean’s not planning to do anything stupid, he’d meant what he told Sam, but still he’s left with the truth of _I don’t know how to live with this._

Minute to minute, hour to hour, Dean does not know how to live with the knowledge that he loves Cas and Cas never knew, that Cas is gone, maybe forever, and that Cas will never know. That’s the truth that makes it hard to breathe, that’s the weight that Dean’s not sure he can carry.

So he prays.

He sits on his bed, arms around his drawn up knees, and tries to keep his breathing steady. He manages, barely, but his eyes are leaking tears without his conscious input, because he guesses that’s just what a nervous breakdown is or whatever. 

“I don’t think I handle it so well when you die, Cas,” he says, like Captain fucking Obvious. “It doesn’t get easier. When I had to burn you, I—I never told you, did I. How much that fucked me up. But Cas, it fucked me up,” he admits. It’s still one of the absolute worst moments of his life, wrapping Cas’ beloved body, empty of Cas, in a shroud, watching that pyre burn. “I—I don’t know how I didn’t _know_ then. I should’ve known.”

Fuck. He needs a distraction. He goes down to the shooting range, the gym, tries to tire himself out with the punching bag. It doesn’t really help. It only reminds him of all of the times he and Cas fought side by side, and then he ends up with a new venue to have his ongoing breakdown in, when he’s crying in the goddamn shower. 

“I prayed to you every night for a year, in purgatory,” he says, the hot water streaming down to overtake his tears. “Every single night. Finding you in there was all I cared about. Guess some things don’t change, huh?”

He gets out of the shower, changes into pajamas. It’s early still, but Sam and Eileen probably won’t be back for a while yet, and Dean has nothing else to do, so he gets in bed. He can’t sleep, of course. Just ends up staring up at the ceiling in the dark.

“I didn’t tell you before, but Mitch at the garage, he thought I was a widower. One goddamn look at me, and he figured, ‘well that sad bastard has lost his—’” Even still, even now, Dean can’t say it. He stops, presses his shaking hands against his face. “That’s not what I wanna be, Cas. So you have to come back, if there’s any way. Please.”

Forget about sleeping. He doesn’t want to know what he’ll dream. He gets up and paces the hallways and he prays and he paces some more, still praying, and he wonders, a little hysterically, if he’s finally snapped, if he’s gonna be the nutjob who wanders his house talking to himself, but right now, he doesn’t care.

“Cas, I cannot fucking believe you gave me a whole goddamn speech about how I do everything for—for love, but you didn’t know all the shit I’ve done because I love you. I mean, yeah, obviously, I’m a clueless asshole, but if you think I’m the most loving human you know, then you gotta know, Cas, you gotta know you’ve got a lot of that love too.” 

Dean refuses to let Sam find him pacing around talking to himself like a crazy person, so he goes back to his room. He still gets a little bit of a kick out of that— _his_ room, actually his, not just some motel room—but tonight his room at the bunker feels like a prison cell. 

Maybe he should go for a drive or something, just get out. No, he can’t do that, Sam will freak the fuck out if he gets home and finds Dean gone. And anyway, there’s no running from this, he realizes. There never has been. 

“Why didn’t you say anything earlier, Cas?” Dean asks the empty room. Except he knows why, of course. It’s on him, this one is entirely his fault. “I mean, I knew you, uh, care about me, obviously. We’re—we’re best friends, you know? We’re family. But I thought angels didn’t—couldn’t—I mean, I wasn’t sure you even could. Want me like that, I mean. And I—uh. With guys, I don’t—not usually, I mean, and—”

Shit. One breakdown at a time. And anyway, this is Cas. Sure, there’s the awareness that Cas is something much bigger and probably way more terrifying than the body he wears, but Dean’s not _not_ into that body. His eyes are very blue, and his hands are—nice, and you wouldn’t know it with all the too-rumpled clothes Cas wears, but Dean happens to know there’s a pretty banging body under there, and okay, yeah, Dean has let himself want, a few times, has wondered what all of Cas’ intense focus would be like, in a sexier context. He’s wondered, sometimes, if he could have his best friend and something more too, before viciously shoving the thought down as useless and somehow shameful.

“But I would, with you. If that’s a thing you want,” he finishes lamely. “Because um. I want it too. I want _you_.”

 _Real smooth, Winchester_ , he thinks with a wince. Shit, he needs a drink to deal with this. 

Instead, he sinks to his knees again by his bedside, heedless of how much it starts to hurt, because apparently his knees are really not up to doing this so often, or like, at all: “I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I’m so fucking sorry. I—I can’t stand thinking that you don’t know. That you think you can’t have what you want. I don’t know why the hell you’d want me, but since you do, you’ve got me, Cas. You’ve always got me.”

He talks and talks and all of it is a prayer: every shared memory, every realization of just how long this thing between them has been burning, every aching apology, every bitter regret, every desire he’s shoved down and pushed aside. 

At some point, Jack comes by, and after Dean gets over the goddamn heart attack at his sudden appearance, for a second, Dean wonders if Sam’s been worrying about him enough to send prayers Jack’s way, or if maybe his own desperate prayers have reached Jack. And then, sudden and brutal, hope savages him, worse than any werewolf or vamp attack.

“Jack, what are you—”

“I heard you,” interrupts Jack, wide-eyed, staring at Dean with an intensity that’s disconcerting when set against how very young he still looks.

“Oh. Uh, sorry, I didn’t mean to—wait. Can you get him out? Jack, can you bring Cas back—”

“No,” says Jack, and then he steps close to hug Dean, tight and long. “No, I can’t, and there are things I can’t—or shouldn’t—do, but. Dean. Keep doing what you’re doing, okay?”

Dean pulls back, looks at Jack. “What? What am I supposed to be doing?”

Jack’s face is bright with desperate hope. “Loving him.”

“What?” Dean says again. “That’s all?”

“That’s everything,” says Jack, fervent. “Don’t give up, okay?” he adds, and after one more fast hug, he’s gone.

* * *

Dean eventually tires himself out, his litany of prayer subsiding into silence, into vague and frantic half-dreams, full of the blue of Cas’ eyes, the rumble of his voice, the white-hot flash of his grace, the clean and strong lines of his jaw, his throat, the shadow of his wings, vast and dark. To Dean’s dismay, they look ragged and tattered, but with the gentle inevitability of dream logic, they turn sleek and full-feathered again, and Dean thinks he hears something— 

Dean’s very faintly aware of his bedroom door opening and someone approaching his bed: Sammy, judging by that sasquatch tread.

“Dean?” whispers Sam, and Dean feels Sam brush a hand over his forehead—ugh, he’s not sick—and then he’s asleep, the sound of wings following him into the dreaming darkness.

* * *

He has strange dreams. 

Usually, his dreams are pretty straightforward: familiar settings and familiar people, just with weird dream logic on top of them. Plenty of nightmares too, obviously, but dream or nightmare, he doesn’t need a shrink to understand what any of them mean, if they mean anything. Like yeah, he gets it, he’s got trauma and also he has a lot of anxiety about not saving people or hunting things. 

These dreams aren’t that. They are all shape and color and a writhing darkness, nothing that coheres into sense, full of something he can’t quite perceive, like his brain doesn’t have the right hardware for it. 

But in the darkness, there’s a light growing. Just a pinprick at first, like a star twinkling in hazy twilight, and then it glows brighter and brighter, and bigger and bigger, and he thinks he ought to be scared or worried, but he’s not, because the light feels like every good and warm thing he’s ever had, and there’s something familiar in it, something he can’t see but that he understands, that he knows.

 _Cas,_ he thinks, even his strange dreams full of prayer, and then he sinks into the deeper darkness of a dreamless sleep.

* * *

Cas’ name is still on his lips when Dean wakes up, trembling. Or no—he’s not the one shaking, it’s everything else: there’s a tremor running through the bunker, in the ground and in the walls. It’s not like the couple of earthquakes he’s felt, there’s no pitch or sway to the movement, no jolt and judder. It’s a rumble, deep and subtle, like thunder going through the whole world. When he gets up, he feels it coming up through his bare feet, and when he presses his hand to the wall—all of a sudden he _knows_.

Cas.

“Dean?” Sam calls from the hallway. “Dean, do you feel that? We gotta go, I think this is an earthquake, we should probably get out of here in case this place collapses—”

“It’s not an earthquake,” Dean tells him, and starts running.

He’s vaguely aware of Sam and Eileen following him, shouting questions, and he considers stopping for half a second to put on some actual clothes that aren’t pajamas, get his shoes—fuck, this is why he never should’ve started wearing dumb pajamas—but the thrum under his feet urges him onward and out, because it’s Cas, this is Cas, he doesn’t know how, but he feels it, he _knows_ it.

“Dean!” calls Sam. “What are you—”

Outside the bunker, the tremble of the earth is more pronounced, and the sky—

“Is it a tornado?” asks Eileen. 

It’s not a tornado. In the near distance, there is a vortex of dark clouds forming, but it’s not spinning into the unmistakable funnel shape of a tornado, it’s just up there in an otherwise perfectly clear and pale early morning sky. And below where the cloud is forming, something is churning the earth, a haze of dust and dirt visible. Dean runs towards it. Or at least, he tries.

“Dean, no!” shouts Sam as he catches up to him and grabs him. “Are you crazy? We gotta—we gotta get back inside or something—”

“Let me go, Sammy, let me go, it’s Cas—”

“What?”

Dean’s not exactly proud of it, but he digs a vicious elbow into Sam’s kidney and when Sam’s grip on him weakens in surprise, he wrenches himself free and runs. 

He runs, heedless of his bare feet, heedless of the ozone-smelling wind that lashes at him, heedless of the rain that begins to pound down and turns the ground muddy beneath him, because there, under that swirling cloud, is a familiar and growing glow of searing white-blue.

 _Cas,_ he prays, and the shaking of the earth is an answer, and the sound of the wind through the grasses is an answer, and the heavy rain soaking him is an answer. Dean hadn’t gotten it in that barn all those years ago, hadn’t heard Cas’ voice in the storm then, but he hears it now, he _knows_ it now, even if he doesn’t understand the words.

Dean runs and runs. The prairie he’s running through is bursting into life, wildflowers growing in heady profusion in fast-forward all around him, blooms in every color of the sunrise and sunset: sunshine yellow and dusky pink and cheerful orange, soft purple and pale blue, as if some mighty and invisible hand is dotting the plains with vibrant paint and pastels. The grasses are growing too, so fast that he can hear it, a susurration like a distant ocean. 

_Cas,_ he prays again, and the sweet smell of the flowers rises up along with the scents of wet earth and the storm as if in answer, easing the burning path of his gasping breaths with grace as cool as water. It distracts him enough that he has to careen wildly to avoid a tree that pushes out of the ground, going from sapling to full grown between one blink and the next, and when he looks, more and more trees are springing out of the ground in a loose circle around the still-brightening glow, cottonwoods and oaks growing up and up towards the sky in mere seconds with mighty creaking groans.

When Dean gets closer to the glow, he has to slow down, the ground too unsteady under his feet, because, he realizes, there’s some kind of sinkhole forming, just a few yards away. He walks towards the edge of it carefully—he does not want to die of literally falling into a hole—and stops as soon as he’s close enough to peer inside it, squinting against the bright blue-white glow. He can hear the earth groan and shift, the rush of water and the plop and splash noises of things falling into it.

“Dean, get away from there!” shouts Sam, and huh, okay, he’s right, because the hole is getting bigger. 

He scrambles back as the earth falls away in front of him, but the rumble in the ground is already dying down and he figures the hole’s as big as it’s gonna get, which is plenty big enough at about fifty feet across, a mini-forest still growing up all around it. Or, it’s not a sinkhole—it’s a lake, or it’s becoming one anyway, filling up rapidly with water that’s welling up from who knows where, water that’s impossibly pure and clear instead of brackish and muddy. The glow that had drawn Dean here is sparkling inside the water, turning it glacier blue, its gently rocking surface marked with a series of concentric circles as the now-gentle rain falls onto its surface.

He kneels down. There’s about a half-foot drop into the water, the ground having sheared away, and he reaches a hand out to test the water. It’s cool, but more than that, he feels the searing rush of Cas’ grace, fierce and joyful. He peers down into the depths. Despite the clarity of the water, he can’t make out the bottom of the sinkhole turned lake. But he can see that there’s something down there.

“Dean! What are you doing!”

“It’s Cas,” says Dean, and if Cas is just a disembodied pool of grace now, Dean will take it, he will, they can figure something out surely, but—

There’s something in the water, coming up fast. He sees the wings first, dark and vast, spanning the whole diameter of the freshly-formed lake, and then—

“Cas!”

The water rocks, and there he is: Cas, surging upwards, borne through the water on his wings. The closer he gets to the surface, the more transparent his wings become, until they disappear to wherever it is that Cas tucks them away when he’s in a human body, and then it’s just Cas in the water, swimming towards him.

Dean reaches down and grips him tight, raises him up.

“Hello Dean,” says Cas, not even breathless, and he’s looking at Dean like Dean’s the miracle here, and not Cas himself, who’s naked and dripping wet and blessedly, beautifully alive. “I heard your prayers.”

After all those prayers, Dean is out of words, so he lets his body speak for him, and drags Cas in for a kiss. There’s nothing inherently different about kissing a guy, Dean quickly realizes, but there’s sure as hell something different about kissing Cas, because Cas kisses with the same relentless intensity that he’s always looked at Dean with, and it’s Dean who has to struggle to keep up, to use his lips and his tongue to tell Cas without words _yes_ and _please_ and _holy shit why did we take so long to do this_.

Between kisses, he finds the right words. “What you said before, about wanting what you can’t have. You can have me, Cas. Everything, for as long as you want.”

Cas blinks rapidly and cups Dean’s face with his hands, tender and almost reverent. “I know,” he says, his voice low and shaky, and then, “I heard your prayers,” he says again, wondering and joyful this time before he kisses Dean, so softly it makes Dean tremble all the way from his skin to his soul, and he keeps kissing Dean, this new language of theirs already gaining fluency.

Distantly, he’s aware of Sam saying _what the fuck, is that a rainbow? Seriously?_

And when Dean reluctantly pulls away from Cas and looks up, sure enough, there it is: a rainbow, along with the sun breaking through the swiftly dissolving storm clouds. Dean laughs, kisses Cas again.

“Little bit on the nose there, Cas,” he says, and Cas grins at him, so happy he looks dazed with it, happier than Dean has ever seen him.

 _Is that really because of me_ , wonders Dean, astonished, and the brightness in Cas’ eyes is his answer.

Cas laughs. “I’m afraid I can’t help it, Dean.”

* * *

They hoof it back to the bunker before anyone shows up to examine the miracle Cas has wrought in the middle of the prairie, and they tumble into the bunker soaking wet and still in their pajamas. Cas at least has used his grace to summon up some clothes, his same old holy tax accountant outfit that has Dean’s heart swelling with frankly disproportionate fondness. It’s far from the most flattering look, and yet, it is a beloved one, the coat and button-down shirt and tie just as much a uniform as Dean and Sam’s flannels and jeans are.

“Still?” asks Dean, and reaches out to adjust Cas’ tie, which is somehow always crooked, even now.

Cas shrugs. “It’s familiar,” he says, and then his lips curve up. “And you like it.”

Dean can’t say no to that.

Eventually, once everyone’s cleaned up and fully dressed, and Jack’s come by for a visit, there’s breakfast and explanations: Cas had been in the Empty, yes, but Dean’s prayers had reached him. More importantly still, Jack tells them between mouthfuls of syrup-drenched pancake, Dean’s love had reached Cas, and Cas’ love had reached back.

“So you’re saying that Dean literally saved Cas with the power of love,” says Sam. “How?”

Jack squints and says, “Kind of? There’s no place for love, in the Empty. Not like that. Love—it has a power of its own, and it’s kind of the antithesis of the Empty. Love is...creation. A new genesis. If there’s so much love in the void, then it isn’t the void, you know? So...the Empty spat Cas back out.” He casts an apologetic and slightly anxious look at all of them. “Sorry, I’m no good at explaining it.”

 _A new genesis_. That makes a kind of sense to Dean, after all his research into the lore around the Empty and various creation myths about the primordial darkness. Though the idea that it was loving Cas and Cas loving him that overcame the oldest thing in the universe...well, Dean’s not gonna be able to wrap his head around that any time soon.

“You’re doing just fine,” Cas reassures Jack.

“And you thought I didn’t love you back,” Dean tells Cas, downright smug now that he’s got an arm slung around a living and breathing Cas’ shoulders. 

Cas leans against him and just that is enough to make Dean smile so wide his face starts to hurt. He has pancakes and bacon and coffee, his family, Cas. Dean doesn’t think he’s ever been so perfectly content. Sam rolls his eyes at Dean, but he’s grinning too.

“What about Cas’ grace? Are you, like, back to being a full-powered angel, Cas?” Sam asks.

“Does it matter?” Dean retorts, because honestly, it doesn’t matter so much to Dean, apart from how Cas is somewhat safer as an angel. 

Sam rolls his eyes. “No, but—”

And anyway, Dean finds that he knows the answer without entirely knowing how. Cas is always Cas: intense and dryly hilarious and a badass who can still be kind. But fully powered up Cas is something else too; there’s an intangible sense that he’s a lot _bigger_ than the body he wears. After seeing the miracle Cas had wrought out in the prairie, Dean is acutely aware that there’s a Chrysler-building sized multidimensional wavelength of celestial intent jammed in that trenchcoat-wearing body, and a faint sense of power lingers around Cas, heady and familiar.

“I am, I think,” says Cas, cutting off their bickering at the pass. “Though it feels...different.”

That has Dean looking at Cas in alarm. “Different bad or different good?”

Cas tilts his head and squints thoughtfully. “Different good.”

Jack beams at Cas. “Your power is your own now. It’s not tethered to heaven, or, uh, me. It’s all you!”

“I suppose that’s why we have a lovely new lake near the bunker now?” says Eileen, and Cas gives her a crooked grin and slightly bashful nod. 

“It’s gonna be fun explaining that one to everyone who shows up to gawk,” Sam says wryly. 

“Call it a miracle,” says Dean, and he means for it to be flippant, but the words come out rough and sincere, because it _is_ a miracle, all the more precious and amazing because it’s a miracle they’ve all made, out of Dean’s prayers and Cas’ love and Jack’s determination to be good, and the freedom they’ve all fought so hard for.

Cas takes his hand and looks at him with shining eyes, and Dean hangs on tight. 

* * *

Later, Sam and Eileen clear out in a transparent ploy to give Dean and Cas some time alone in the bunker, leaving them in the kitchen with nothing but dirty dishes and the dregs of the coffee pot. The moment pretty immediately turns awkward. If Dean had been looking for any proof that his life is no longer a narrative crafted by a malicious god, this is it, because it’s just so damned anti-climactic. Getting Cas back is no kind of ending, which is good, which is _awesome_ , but it leaves Dean feeling oddly untethered in the present, wholly uncertain what the future holds. Should he...take Cas on a date? They kinda skipped over that, what with the love confessions and the apocalypses and the returns from the dead.

“So, uh….I’d catch you up on what you’ve missed,” Dean says, “But if you’ve been hearing my prayers, there’s not much more to say.”

Cas gets up in his personal space and puts one hand on his hip, tight and possessive, and brings the other up to cup Dean’s cheek gently. His eyes are the bluest thing Dean’s ever seen, like the blue of the sky took its cue from Cas’ eyes and not the other way around. “There’s not so much to say, no. But there is plenty to do,” Cas says, and then he kisses Dean.

It’s not like the kisses from before.

This is a kiss with _intent_ , dirtier than Dean could have ever expected from Cas, and it’s a whole new and dizzying avenue for his habitual intensity. Dean’s downright weak in the knees just trying to keep up, and he feels like he should be breathless with how long they’re kissing, but he’s not, and he suspects Cas has something to do with that. It’s surprisingly hot. Also kissing is definitely more important than air and Dean has no objections to Cas making it so Dean only needs one of those things.

The kitchen is far from the most comfortable venue for this, so Dean walks them to his room, kissing the whole way, barely looking where they’re going, eyes only on each other, hands roaming all over. They never stumble or falter though, Cas doesn’t let them, until they get to Dean’s bed and fall into it.

Cas is apparently out of patience, because he straight up graces their clothes away, which feels a lot like taking a very, very short dip in a very cold lake. Dean yelps, goosebumps immediately rising on his skin before Cas bears him down onto the bed and covers him with his body, all the strength in him damn near humming against Dean’s wondering hands, the blue of his eyes as depthless as the lake he’d miracled up, and Dean happily falls in.

They kiss and touch and move against each other, and Dean’s had a lot of sex, but it’s never felt like this before. He kisses Cas’ lips and cheeks and throat and chest, he drags his hands down Cas’ broad back and over his hips and down his muscled thighs, strokes his hard cock, he makes exploring Cas’ body the subject of his absolute focus, and still he wants more. Cas, Dean thinks hazily, will probably give it to him.

“You don’t have to keep praying to me, Dean. I’m right here. I’m right here, I’m not going anywhere—”

Is he praying? He supposes he must be. But if he is, if every kiss is a prayer and every touch is worship and every sigh and moan is hallelujah, then Dean doesn’t know how to stop, and doesn’t want to.

He knows this isn’t heaven, but fuck, it has to be close to it.

“Cas, please,” he says or prays or begs, and Cas answers him in the best possible way.


End file.
